“I went in search of an astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces… America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved… The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets: this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world… We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game… It is erosion and it is extermination, but it is also the tracking shot, the movies… Hence the exceptional scenic qualities of the deserts of the West, combining as they do the most ancestral of hieroglyphs, the most vivid light and the most total superficiality.”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 200 pages

“Cool Memories is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense. I’m trying to grasp the world in all its silences and its brutality. Can you grasp a world when you’re no longer tied to it by some kind of ideological enthusiasm or by traditional passions? Can things ‘tell’ themselves through stories and fragments? These are some of the questions posed in a book which may seem melancholic. But then I think almost every diary is melancholic. Melancholy is in the very state of things.”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 233 pages

“Baudrillard’s latest commentary on the techno present and future, an installment of his reflections on the reality of contemporary western culture.”

Publisher: Duke University
Paperback: 90 pages

Lecture on film, TV and the image at the University of Sydney in Australia. Also an interview which sheds light on Baudrillard’s notions of objective irony, seduction and hyperreality.

Publisher: Power
Paperback: 54 pages

This collection of essays attempts an analysis of the sign form in the same way that Marx’s critique of political economy sought an analysis of the commodity form. Some of his better earlier writings, before he discovered postmodernism. AK

Publisher: Telos
Paperback: 214 pages

“The war, along with the fake and presumptive warriors, generals, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watches itself in a mirror: Am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?”

Publisher: Power
Paperback: 87 pages

“The year 2000, the end of the millennium: Is this anything other than a mirage, the illusion of an end, like so many other imaginary endpoints which have littered the path of history… Baudrillard argues that the notion of the end is part of the fantasy of a linear history. Today, we are not approaching the end of history but moving into reverse, into a process of systematic obliteration. We are wiping out the entire 20th century…”

Publisher: Stanford University
Paperback: 123 pages

“Baudrillard expounds on his view that the social and the ‘masses’ no longer exist.”

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 123 pages

An examination of the lessons of Marxism and an attempt to free the Marxist logic from the restrictive context of political economy. Early Baudrillard at his best. AK

Publisher: Telos
Paperback: 167 pages

“The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced… the hyperreal, which is entirely in simulation.”

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 162 pages